Giving up again on Windows 7, and on Windows as my main operating system for work machines

I recently switched back to Windows 7, for work purposes, for a couple of weeks. Here's what I've learned, and why I'm switching back to Windows 10, but only inside a VM:

1. Suspend and resume, and sleep/wake functions in Windows 7 are horrible, even on decent hardware.  Windows 10 is vastly superior, faster and more stable.

2. Windows update on windows 7 is horrible and broken, and even the ability to supposedly "pause" these updates, is actually only a partial pause. There are still times when TrustedInstaller.exe is going to chew up all your I/O bandwidth and pwn your machine. 

There really is no stable way to run modern 32 bit or 64 bit Windows applications on your computer, and maintain control of your computer, unless you fight Windows by boxing it in a VM.

I'm switching back to "Windows 10 in a VM", on a very fast Solid State Drive with a huge amount of RAM. I can pause Windows 10 updates by one simple trick. Shut windows 10 off, and only use Windows for what I actually need it for, which is when I'm getting paid to write and repair Delphi code.

If anyone has read any formal write-up on what sorts of invisible installs Microsoft slides out to users, even in Windows 7, and what they do, and why, I'd like to know about it.

Other surprising things in Windows include:

* The ready boost features, which like most attempts at smart caching, show that caching and cache invalidation are truly hard problems, NP hard, nearly impossible problems.  You can speed some users up, deploy your solution, and actually end up decreasing their net system performance for THEIR workloads.  ReadyBoost in Vista was a complete disaster.   It has been scaled back and restricted in its application and it rarely hurts you on Windows 7, and on Windows 10, it has been coralled and controlled enough that it rarely has a downside.

* The windows search indexing feature, and the windows defender anti-virus active mode, can radically cripple your system performance by adding I/O latency, stealing I/O bandwidth and CPU resources, and of course, all of it steals RAM.

When I have performance problems on Windows, I am used to switching to the I/O monitoring features of the Windows Resource Manager.  Most often, my computer, when slow is I/O bound, it is seldom ram/swap bound, and most often its programs that are doing things I literally do not care about, taking away the resources that should be doing work I care about.

I do not see a solution here, since Microsoft does not permit you low level control of your own system. At one time, in the Windows 2000, NT, XP era, Microsoft permitted you to turn off ANY service in Windows, and the list of services that ran in the background was quite manageable. The list of processes on a freshly booted Windows system is so large, and so much stuff runs now, that you just better realize that about 8 GB of RAM, and about 4 MB/s of your total I/O bandwidth, and at least one full core of CPU, is off the table, that's reserved for Microsoft, and whatever it decides to use your computer for.   If sometimes it finishes and you can actually use your WHOLE computer for a few minutes, you should really be thanking Microsoft and not so annoyed that, on the whole, Microsoft thinks your computer should be doing something other than compiling your code or serving up a database to your users, that 75% of your computer is yours,  most of the time, and that 25% of it is Microsoft's most of the time.

Windows 10 then introduces this "active hours" configuration, which just might be the critical factor in deciding whether to use Windows 10 or Windows 7 for serious professional development work. Microsoft has at least decided that, for now, during the hours of 8 AM to 7 PM, I am permitted a modicum of control over what happens on my computer.  Thanks, Satya.